Every Eye Trained on a Different Star
by TimeTheFinalFrontier
Summary: In a post-apocalyptic world, England lays in the ruins and dreams of his beloved.


_Warnings for character death, assisted suicide/murder, and suicide. _

De-anon from the Kink Meme from this prompt:

Any Nation: Post apocalyptic world

"What it says on the tin. The Nations (Or Nation) are in a post apocalyptic world. What kind of world it is and what the nations are doing in this world/their statuses/if they are even still alive are up to you.

Genre is up to author- but I'd love you to bits if it is a tearjerker. I'd love you even more if you made my heart break."

* * *

_I find the map and draw a straight line_

_Over rivers, farms, and state lines..._

_The distance from me to where you're be –_

_It's only finger-lengths that I see_

_I touch the place_

_Where I'd find your face_

_My fingers in creases_

_Of distant, dark places..._

Arthur fumbled with clumsy, freezing, bleeding fingers to find the map he knew he'd left on his desk before the evacuation. The ceiling was laying in ruins at his feet, and the once polished oak desk is covered with ash and dirt and the grime of two decades of exposure. A weak, dying, old, exhausted part of him fought down the urge to clean off the ash and tidy the molding papers. He contented himself with brushing the soot off the cracked glass holding the one thing in the room that was left undamaged, the one thing in the world that mattered to Arthur.

Slowly, painfully, he made his way around the debris on shaking, broken legs and badly healed, shattered knee-caps and bare feet stained red and rough with gravel and broken shards of glass to his old chair. It'd been plush red leather, once, imported from France, but now it was just another ruin, faded and cracked from years of rain and sleet and snow and radiation. One day, perhaps, long after he died, decades from now, a smiling sun would peek out from the breaking cloud cover and look down in wonder upon the shattered splendor of what had once been London before the bombs came.

He sat down in it with a weary sigh, and the floor creaked threateningly. It probably wasn't the best idea to be on the third floor of a dangerously unstable building, he reflected, but then again, there didn't seem to be very many good ideas left in the world anymore. With trembling, numb fingers he peeled away the glass that had been separating the map from the elements for so many years. He lifted the map from its frame the way one would lift a child from its crib, and cradled it against his chest.

"Oh, Alfred," he whispered, eyes burning with tears. "I'm so sorry."

No one knew how the war had started, nor who started it. At the end, there was a sort of general agreement that it had just been one horrendous mistake, a fluke, an accident, a misfire that spiraled out of control. By then, though, it'd been too late. The humans had been all too happy to take up arms and the bombs had started flying before anyone knew what had happened. One thing led to another, and before the year was out, every major city lay in ruins and the never-ending snow of nuclear winter had begun to fall.

Most people survived the initial bombs. The evacuations were swift and effective, and only a fraction of the population died in the war.

It was only once the war was over, though, that a black cloud of death descended upon the Earth. Anarchy picked off the old and the weak and the small and the very young and the people who couldn't run fast enough. Millions froze to death, and once the crops failed in the aftermath, billions more starved. Many more succumbed to radiation sickness and a tragically large number met their fate at the hand of diseases that, just two years ago, had not been reason enough to take off of work.

Five years later, the last few thousand survivors were struggling to hang on.

After that, all that was left of the billions thriving on the planet were a few lone stragglers who had managed to survive the bombs and the cold and the famine and the drought and the plague and spent the rest of their days wandering the wastelands like pale, ashen faced zombies who were just waiting to die.

It had been over ten years since Arthur had last seen a survivor.

Back in the days when they'd been fighting enemies like Germany, conquerable, manageable, fathomable enemies instead of the mindless, aimless fear they'd battled with and lost to in the last war, they'd wondered if they'd be able to feel if another one of their kind died.

The lucky ones didn't live to find out. They didn't live to feel their brothers and sisters die. They didn't live to watch their best friends die in their arms. They didn't live to feel their people die out one by one until they were the only ones left.

At the very end, when there were only five or so of them left, they developed a stronger connection and could feel each other's emotions and sometimes see flashes of light and color from one another.

They'd lived like that for a good two years – just him, America, Iceland, Sweden, and Finland. Sweden and Finland were the only two lucky enough to live together, and while the thought of finding each other often crossed their minds, they all knew it was too dangerous to travel out in the open because of the lingering radiation.

And maybe they could have worked something out, if they'd all waited another decade or so, and meet each other half-way in Iceland while they waited for the world to start itself up again, but...

No one wanted to be the last to die. Their greatest fear was of being the last one standing. At the end of the world, there was no bravery, no heroics, nothing at all left of what had once kept them divided.

Sweden and Finland had gotten a hold of some cyanide tablets. It'd been a mercy killing, of sorts, each of them putting two tabs in the other's mouth and sharing a final deadly kiss in a morbid parody of what they'd once been. A week later it was only him and America.

And across the ocean separating them, they'd shared the same thoughts and the same fears and the same lost hopes and broken dreams.

Which was why Arthur was here, on the third floor of a dangerously unstable building just miles from a ground zero, crying over a map of the United States of America.

_I hang my coat up in the first bar_

_There is no peace that I've left so far_

_The laughter penetrates my silence_

_As drunken men find flaws in silence_

_Their words mostly noises_

_Ghosts with just voices_

_Your words in my memory_

_Are like music to me..._

* * *

"I'll never give up on you, okay?" America says in his mind, and it's 1944, and God does he need to hear it.

"I'll never let you fall," America says, and it's the Cold War, and it's the end of the fucking world, because there are missiles in Cuba and fingers itching on triggers and no one has ever been this scared in their lives.

"I'll always love you," America says with a smile, and it's just a week before the war and it's the last time in his life that he'll ever feel happy, and he's sure he'd cherish it more if he knew, that he would hang onto that feeling as he'd be hanging on to life just two decades later, that he'd throw away the paperwork he had to do and take America to bed and never let him leave and lay there with him until the world ended.

"You should really get up," Francis's ghost said, sitting on a jagged piece of concrete and smiling as a bird flew right through him.

"I think I broke my back," Arthur responded, bringing the map to his trembling lips and kissing Maine tenderly.

"Our boys," Francis sighed.

"Not ours anymore," Arthur responded with a pout.

"Not boys, anymore, either," Francis agreed.

"One of them isn't even alive anymore," Arthur added.

"Casualties of war," Francis said with a grin.

"If you weren't dead and I weren't half paralyzed, I'd get up and strangle you," Arthur whispered.

"No you wouldn't. You'd put me in a glass box with ample food and water and force me to do it yourself once you died so you wouldn't have to be the last one standing."

"Were you really this horrid to be around when you were still alive?"

"You know what they say – there's nothing better for a sense of humor than death."

"No one said that. Ever. That doesn't even make sense. Frog," he added as an afterthought, coughing up blood.

"There's the sweet Arthur we all know and love."

"Shut up."

"You don't really want that. You don't want to die alone, remember?"

"Not alone," Arthur mumbled, gesturing to the map.

"Tsk, tsk," Francis said, floating down to lie down next to Arthur. "I feel really sorry for you."

Arthur laughed harshly and coughed up more blood. "How long do you think I have left?"

"A day at most. You picked a really bad place to break your back, with all the radiation floating around here," Francis said, ineffectively trying to brush Arthur's hair out of his eyes. "Remember when we were children and you wanted me to cut your hair to look like mine?"

"I wish we'd spent less time fighting," Arthur said, and started to sob.

"Come now," Francis soothed him, "where would be the fun in that?"

"I miss you," Arthur bawled. "And all the time we had together, we spent fighting, and now we don't have anymore time because you're _dead!_"

"We'll see each other again in heaven," Francis suggested.

Arthur gave a small, self-pitying laugh at this. "As if. If there is such a thing as Hell, you're first in line to go there."

"Oh? And you're not?" Francis raised one elegant eyebrow.

"I'm already in hell," Arthur reminded him. "I'm paralyzed and dying in an irradiated wasteland, the whole world is dead, and I have no one but a ghost and a map to keep me company. And there's not even going to be a funeral." Arthur started crying again with that last thought.

"Really? You're one of the last two people left alive in the world and _that's_ the thing that saddens you most?"

"No, it's actually the least horrible thing in the world at the moment."

"You do have a point there."

"Francis?"

"Yeah?"

"I really do love you." Arthur paused. "Even if I do still sort of hate your guts."

The echo of laughter from another place and another time filled the broken room and scattered across the debris of the three floors that had come crashing down below him and that would serve as his final resting place.

_And miles from where you are,_

_I lay down on the cold ground_

_I pray that something picks me up _

_And sets me down in your warm arms_

_After I have travelled so far_

_We'd set the fire to the third bar_

_We'd share each other like an island_

_Until, exhausted, close our eyelids_

_And, dreaming, pick up from _

_The last place we left off_

_Your soft skin is weeping_

_A joy, you can keep it... _

* * *

Somehow, Arthur had managed to roll over onto his side. He was lying such that he was facing the map and was able to reach out and touch it or pull it closer to him with little effort.

Fingers shaking and bleeding, Arthur traced the borders of each of Alfred's states and allowed his knuckles to sweep across the expanse of the Rocky Mountains. After a while, he notices that Texas is wet and that New York is red.

"He's dying," Francis said from somewhere above him.

"No," Arthur whispered, pressing harder against the map.

"He's bleeding to death."

"No, no, no, nonononono! This wasn't supposed to happen! He was supposed to let me die first! He was supposed to be the h-hero!" Arthur punched the map, and his hand went straight through the Midwest.

"It won't be long now," Francis said softly.

"No!" Arthur howled, pulling the broken map towards him and curling around it like it was the only thing keeping him alive.

_And miles from where you are,_

_I lay down on the cold ground_

_I pray that something picks me up _

_And sets me down in your warm arms_

Arthur feels something snap inside of him and pulls the crumpled map up to his lips. "Alfred?"

"He's already gone," Francis said, sitting down in front of Arthur.

"A-Alfred?" Arthur asked again, voice breaking.

"It won't be long before you join him," Francis mused.

"Alfred!" Arthur shouted at the map, desperate, and when no reply was forthcoming he wrapped his arms around the map and around himself and began to shake.

"Don't worry, it won't hurt. It won't be long now at all."

Arthur drew in a deep breath and began to cough thick, wrenching coughs that gradually grew weaker as blood began to fill his mouth and cut off his air supply.

"Just relax. It'll all be over soon."

The edges of Arthur's world began to grow black as he desperately fought for air. His shaking grew stronger before it stopped entirely, and Arthur's entire body ceased its struggle and went still.

"That's it, just let it happen. Come on, count with me, and nothing will ever hurt again... That's right. Five..."

_I don't want to die,_ Arthur thought frantically.

"Four..."

_I don't want this to be the end. Two thousand years and I'm dying alone in a cold basement in London at the end of the world._

"Three..."

_No, no, no, this wasn't right, it wasn't supposed to end this way, it was never going to end this way, Alfred promised!_

"Two..."

_Francis, stop counting. Please, god damn you. I'm not going to die today! I'm not!_

"One..."

_Not here, not now, not today, not-_

Silence.


End file.
